I’m not usually one for New Year Resolutions – mostly because I’m happy to try out new resolutions (and build new habits) any time of the year.

But the timing for my lastest resolution happens to be now, so I’m calling this my new years resolution: To accomplish one painful task each day.

What is a painful task? Any conversation that I’ve been delaying, procrastinating, hiding from, etc. Dealing with a unpleasant or tedious to-do. Delivering less-than-good news. This could be work-related or personal.

Typically for me these tend to build up until I have 5 or 6 items stacked up. This resolution lets me work through my current pile one day at a time, and then hopefully should prevent me from delaying too long in the future. And these should be tackled in order of most-pain to least – but we’ll see if I can pull that off.